


Lex Talionis

by ArgentNoelle



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Curses, Gen, Horror, Loki Has Issues, Loki-centric, Loss of Innocence, Self-Destruction, Self-Hatred, Time Travel, Torture, Warning: Loki, loki meets loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-15 01:05:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3432386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentNoelle/pseuds/ArgentNoelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It settles into his bones like the drowned screams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART ONE

_Laufeyson,_ Thor called him, and Loki broke each finger on his right hand and then sawed it off at the wrist. It took a terribly long time, and somewhere in the middle the screaming started. His head was circling, and his hands were shaking. Thor looked at him with eyes like the storm with no mercy, no love. It had been such a very long time. He felt a smile curling like a gash across his own face, and wondered what a sight they presented. Thor strained at the chains that bound him and _jangle, jangle, clink_ they went. It was terribly sad.

He started to hum, a soft little song whose tone calmed him, though he could no longer remember from where he had heard it, or why it mattered. He did notice the effect it had on Thor, though—all that terribly bright anger slipped away for one moment, and he looked nothing more than old and weary and very, very sad. Loki broke both of his knees and the chains hissed and swung like serpents above them. He almost missed the delicious grunt as Thor bit his own tongue and closed his eyes. He remembered the last time. He remembered it somewhere when he had pulled most of Thor’s innards out but he hadn’t yet died. The last time he had cut off Thor’s hand, only that time, it had been nothing more than an illusion. They had both been so young. Almost children. Perhaps, then, things could still have gone another way. Loki didn’t believe that, but he told Thor, musingly, just to see his reaction. Unfortunately, though he wasn’t entirely unconscious, he was hardly in a state to react. The circling in his head wouldn’t stop. The screams had forced its way into his ears and drowned themselves in his head. They floated uneasily.

He remembered where he had heard the song. It was a lullabye Frigga used to sing to them when they were small. Loki scowled. It wasn’t right. Thor had no opinion. The screams were starting to annoy him. He pressed his fingers to Thor’s mouth until he went still and quiet, and then he tried to do the same to his own mouth, but the screams didn’t stop.

* * *

They are young. Thor and Loki are the best of friends, living in the golden, shining Asgard. They have not yet seen the rot that lies under the veneer, skim over the gilded surface as though they had wings and could fly. The king and queen rule well and happily.

Loki sits in his younger self’s room and waits for him. He tries not to look around. Everything has memories attached to them, and they are alien. He wonders if his skin has disappeared, if he has turned invisible, unnoticeable, but when the young boy comes into the room and sees him in the chair leaning back and head tilted, he tries to scream. The doors shut before he can react and Loki springs up, reaching forward to grab the boy and covering his mouth with a bruising grip. The little prince tries to get away—fighting physically, kicking and wiggling and desperately trying to conjure a ball of fire upon his palm. Loki laughs at how pathetic it is. He still thinks he will get away. He still thinks he is loved.

He wants to hear the screams, so he lets go of the boy’s mouth—he screams, louder and louder, but no one will come. No one else can hear. He holds the boy’s wrists, traps him with his body, and lets the coldness flow down from him. He watches as the boy stills in surprise and then in horror, before his struggling redoubles. He watches.

_Little monster_ , he says, almost kindly. _See? We are alike._

The creature is ugly. It has progressed to crying now, to desperate pleas that Loki disregards. He lets go and just watches. He watches the blue thing try to piece together its shattered worldview. Just like he did, once. It watches him in fear, and he grins.

He tells it everything. How Odin stole him only as a tool. How Laufey, his father, abandoned him. Not even good enough for the monsters, you were. Who knows what would happen if Thor found out?

The thing merely shivers. Loki looks around, starts to pace, snarling out his words in increasing anger, but nothing comes to meet it. He is loose, adrift, rocketing through space and there is nothing to collide with, nothing to absorb the impact.

He hates himself more than ever. The young one hasn’t even tried to escape, to move, how could he be so pathetic? Even as a child.

Loki was never a child. He walks forward, slowly, almost without menace, and tilts up his chin, meeting his eyes. The silence lengthens, and he watches the bob of his throat as the little one freezes in terror. He imprecates slowly, letting the words fall oily from his lips, no more silver for him, he is tarnished and empty. That is when his other self goes to true heights of desperation. Fighting like a mad, cornered thing, pleading, cursing.

_“You will kill your family. Thor, Odin—”_ he hesitates. _“Frigga.”_ Better that she die now than live to see what her son would become.

It settles into his bones like the drowned screams.


	2. PART TWO

The terrible one sketched a circle in the air and Loki could feel his throat constricting. He fell to his knees, gasping as blackness began to encroach from the sides of his vision, before the sound of his doors being flung open startled him. He sat up, the pressure leaving his throat, to meet Thor’s concerned gaze. Loki whirled around, but the terrible one was gone.

“Are you all right?” Thor asked. “You look like you’ve seen a _draugr_.”

Loki opened his mouth to tell him everything that had happened, of the terrible one and the way he had turned him into a _Jotun_ and cursed him to kill his family, but it curled itself behind his ribs and he couldn’t speak. He rushed forward, grabbing onto Thor, hearing his own desperate words come out halting and turning to something else.

* * *

He avoided Thor after that, unless they were in the presence of others. He wouldn’t be able to successfully murder Thor if he was outnumbered, and that was important. He tried to ignore the older prince, and found himself noting his brother’s weaknesses.

_Trust_ , that was the first one.

If anyone noticed, it was only to say that Loki had become a quiet, reticent boy; children went through phases; it was only natural.

The plan began to take shape in Loki’s mind.

He tried to fashion a noose of rope, stood within his darkened bedroom and wondered what it felt like to hang oneself. The rope snapped and fell to pieces when he stepped off the edge of the bed, and he looked up to see the terrible one watching him.

He neglected his safety in battle, fighting recklessly, leaving openings that any fool could step through, and felt those that came too close fall without a wound.

Before Thor’s coming of age, he invited his brother on a quest, just the two of them, and saw Thor’s eyes light up. They traveled far, into the mountains, climbing and play-fighting and laughing as though they were children again. Loki felt sickness and hatred spreading through him. He spoke to the night air. “This is what you’ll kill. Thor never did you any harm. He’s my brother. Please.”

He took Thor to a cliff, unstable and prone to rockslides, and they dared one another to climb all the way to the top.

They slept beside the campfire, and Loki woke in the night. He wandered aimlessly through the forest, daring the ground to swallow him, and watched as the stars faded and the light of dawn rose beyond the mountains.

They looked over the cliff edge and Loki picked up a boulder.

“Are you really going to throw that?” Thor asked, amused, and Loki shrugged. “Why not,” he said. He swung it through Thor’s head and watched him fall in strange, jerky motion, magic flowing into the ground and setting the sky alight. The cliff face groaned and slid, rocks upon rocks that swept them away and buried them.

He woke up at the bottom of the rockslide, injured but alive.

“I couldn’t save him,” he said to the search party, shivering, and his eyes were blank and empty.

* * *

It was years before the second plan formed, years in which Loki allowed himself wary comfort in his parents’ arms. It was weak of him, but he couldn’t help himself. He studied the magic of the bed wherein Odin slept, the shimmering magic that protected him from all harm, and discovered how to twist it. He waited until the king was weary, and cajoled his mother from his side for an afternoon in the gardens.

They talked of light matters, rested beneath the shade of the trees, and Loki passed her a glass laced with sedative undetectable by any magic. He allowed a spear-point of ice to form around his hand and pressed it into her chest, pulling his hand back with a sucking squelching sound, and watched the weapon melt from his hand, leaving it clean and untouched. He laid her on the ground with the flowers around her.

He walked slowly back to the king’s chambers, passing by the watching guards and the servant that knelt by the king’s bed, her heart stopped between one beat and the next. He stood before the bed. The shimmering gold had constricted, pulling itself tight around the body within, and the figure was twisted and burnt, eyes staring ahead with reprobation.

He knelt down and vomited until his throat burned and his eyes watered and the phalanx of guards stormed in.

“I did it,” he said thickly. “I killed him, I killed mother, I killed Thor, I killed them all because the terrible one told me to.”

They dragged him to the dungeons.


	3. PART THREE

Sif had watched the recording of the interrogation. Loki had been more than willing to speak, recounting to great length how he had planned out the murder of his family. His manner was manic, with a gleam in his eye and a mouth that twisted up as though he found it all amusing.

She remembered Thor, and her heart grew cold.

* * *

“Are they going to kill me?” his voice was toneless.

She couldn’t look at him. Instead, she looked at the chair as she pulled it out and sat down. The room was white, the light was bright and gave everything within a washed-out cast.

“Yes,” she said.

Loki sighed, losing the tension in his frame. He closed his eyes. “Good,” he murmured, and she glanced at him, startled.

He wore only a tunic and trousers; ripped and dirty from the mistreatment the guards had shown upon him. One eye was blackened, the other watched her with a canny expression.

“Surprised?” he asked.

She didn’t respond.

Instead of continuing the conversation, Loki leaned back, going still. They sat together for some minutes before she spoke.

“Why did you kill them?” she asked at last, though she knew there could be no answer for such a madness.

Loki laughed harshly. It had no humor in it. “Didn’t believe my story? That’s all right, I wouldn’t believe it myself.” He stared at her with dark eyes until she had to look away.

“Go on,” he said, as she paused near the door. “Grieve for them. They deserve it. I don’t.”

* * *

The execution was restricted to those with a reason to be there, though the public stood outside the courtroom, railing and throwing curses and even stones. They needed the guard around the entire perimeter and inside to keep the peace, though it roiled uneasily, chaos only a breadth away. Sif wondered what they would do after, once the truth had sunk in. The royal family was decimated. Would the nobles rally together or fight among themselves? And what of the guard? They had been the ones to take control of the situation, and had not yet been challenged—but that would come soon.

And Loki, who had destroyed it all so easily. He stood without fanfare, without pretense, without the mania which had caused his interrogators to pronounce him guilty and mad. He looked almost peaceful, a strange thing so much at odds with the crowd around him.

The crimes were read off quickly enough, the axe readied; Loki seemed not to hear a word. He was staring into the distance, as if searching, but then his face grew cold as though a mask had been thrown over it, and she saw true hatred upon it. Sif shivered, and turned, following his gaze despite herself. He was looking into the crowd that leaned over the rails, and for one moment she thought she saw what he stared so hatefully at—an image strangely like Loki himself, dressed in battered armour, with long and wild hair framing a skeletal face with eyes that burned. The figure smiled.

And then the axe came down, and she blinked, and the figure was gone.


End file.
